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This Week:Volume 23 Issue 31 - 2015-07-31

International News DeskAt Home: Art with a HeartAround the World: Natural Gas

Volume 23 Issue 31 2015-07-31

At Home: Art with a Heart

One year ago, massive wildfires devastated Slave Lake, Alberta. Rebuilding houses has been a priority, but now a new project is helping to transform those houses into homes.

As the Edmonton Journalreports, Art with a Heart has worked with artists across the country to gather donations that will be placed in the homes of Slave Lake residents who lost everything last May.

The artwork is considered even more appropriate because it has been given as a gift—which means that it comes with additional memories, like much of the artwork that was destroyed in the blazes. The donated art is accompanied by stories about “who [the donors] were as an artist,” creating “a connection to that piece of art,” a project leader told reporters.

Residents are enthusiastic about the project. The donated artwork has been on display in civic centres and other public areas, and residents can submit the names of the pieces they like the most. Preferences will be taken into consideration, with a drawing of names in the case of a tie.

Art with a Heart will be distributing over 120 pieces of original artwork, including “oil, watercolour and acrylic paintings, mixed media, metalwork, bark carvings, masks, ceramic tiles, First Nations art and photography.”

Around the World: Natural Gas

Today, we’re concerned that greenhouse gases have contributed to global warming. But in prehistoric times, the earth may have been kept warm by a different kind of gas entirely.

As National Geographic’s Daily News site reports, “[dinosaurs] may have helped warm ancient Earth via their own natural gaseous emissions.”

The new study bases its conclusions on the habits of modern ruminants like cows or sheep—animals whose emissions account for as much as a fifth of the today’s methane emissions. The study claims that, like these animals, “giant plant-eating dinosaurs likely had microbes in their guts that gave off large amounts of methane.” Methane traps heat even more efficiently than carbon dioxide.

Scientists estimate that the sauropods emitted a methane output that “may have been approximately equal to all modern global methane sources, both natural and manmade,” one of the study authors told reporters.